I was charmed by the small town of Pinedale, Wyoming. Situated about an hour from Jackson Hole, it’s a place of hardy individuals — cowboys, ranchers, outdoors-men, and those who live farming the land. The town honors those rugged individuals who preceded them with this statue of a Mountain Man, situated just outside the town’s visitor center. It’s called “Working the Line”.
Mountain men were the first white pioneers in the area, exploring the mountains and living in the cold and isolated ranges of Wyoming, making a living trapping and trading furs. It was a hard and lonely life, but it appealed to some. The mountain men’s time period was in the mid to late 19th century, before the rail opened the west and the isolation of the mountains was forever lost.
Pinedale has a museum dedicated to these hard individuals who worked the line, the Museum of the Mountain Man. It provides an interesting look at the lives of some tough individuals. Wikipedia has a detailed write-up on Mountain Men if you’d like to read more; here’s that link.
